Bad quality post-rendering problem with HDV 1080i/Premiere Pro CS6

Newbie to the forums here. I registered following the commencement of work on a documentary I have begun with a colleague as I thought it would be a useful back up for advice, knowledge and resources, which I’m now hoping will be the case!

We decided to start documenting a great story we uncovered which has rippled into something much bigger and exciting and is still growing right at this moment. It’s taken us abroad and to some interesting events so far but given the rapid response we have had to employ on little resources, we have been working to a shoestring budget. We’ve done ok so far having secured the use of a Sony Z1 and have our own iMac Intel i5 2.7ghz Quad Core set up with 1TB HDD space and 16GB RAM. We’re using Premiere Pro CS 6.0 (we rolled back from 6.0.1 due to massive instability with OSX Lion and haven’t attempted to upgrade to 6.0.2).

We’ve come to the point of making rushes from 35 hours of HDV tape, imported into Premiere and have now produced about 30 minutes across various sequences so far. First off, HDV 1080i..... Wow. Really poor to what I was hoping for. With having an iMac with decent juice even without realtime hardware or GPU acceleration we opted to take advantage of filming in HD. The 1440 horizontal resolution was the first curious disappointment but my main gripe has been the mpeg2 compression. Having worked with raw DV in the past, the HDV mpeg2 compression looks just terrible with pixelisation under certain conditions such as faster movement and higher variations in colours, particular brighter images.

Anyway, after accepting what we have to work with, we began slicing and dicing our work but noticed a horrendous problem following rendering. Premiere CS6 on the iMac plays back most un-rendered clips with less than 4 layered video tracks without any problem or dropping frames. They look good, not withstanding what I described above. However, following a render on either faster performance or maximum quality and bit depth settings, the resultant footage becomes quite badly pixelised on playback. It isn’t as noticeable on some static shots in the Program Monitor but as soon as you scale to full screen it looks of unacceptable quality. We can’t find a replication of this problem through online searches.

The only workaround so far has been to create an alternative timeline sequences set up for HDV 1080p, even though the Z1 doesn’t shoot in this format. Makes no sense but re-rendering a whole sequence after copying and pasting across from the 1080i timeline gets rid of the previous bad post render pixelisation.

None of it makes much sense and the anxiety is with workarounds, it will just throw up another brick wall problem somewhere later in the workflow. The bigger anxiety at this stage, is that we have some commercial investment now and are working to a timescale which at this point, we’ll never be able to meet without if we get held up with future problems. Even as small guy amatuers, we know we can produce and have been onto something big so far to this point. All we need is the platform to finish our job reliably.

Apologies for the long-winded message but we just wanted to give as much info as possible in the hope someone maybe able to offer us some guidance on what is going on, so we can best establish a suitable workflow that will allow us to produce, export and author ultimately, without further hitches which we have mo time left for.

Seems like a great website, one of the best out there and if anyone has any insight, we’d be eternally grateful.